Citation is the process of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication (journal, book, or other) of a source used in a published work. In professional writing, people cite other published work to provide background information, to position the current work in the established knowledge web, to introduce methodologies, and to compare results. For example, in the area of scientific research, a researcher has to cite to demonstrate his contribution to new knowledge.
Citation analysis or bibliometrics measure the usage and impact of the cited work. Among the measures that have emerged from citation analysis are the citation counts for: an individual article (how often it was cited); an author (total citations, or average citation count per article); a journal (average citation count for the articles in the journal).
Documents within a corpus are often linked together by citations. However, there is a need in the art to provide a technique that can determine which case is most frequently cited for a specific Reason for Citation (RFC).